Electronic media infrastructures and gear are important components of global ICT as movies, television, music, and books all go digital. This post offers a global sampling of sustainability in e-media. We just added albert - a UK entertainment industry initiative.

After you have finished with this post, see more by clicking on the "Green media" tag, above.

The Apple Environmental Responsibility Report is always interesting reading. A focus of the 2017 edition is clean energy in the product supply chain. This means less embedded carbon in Apple products.

Government entities have an important role to play in encouraging sustainable ICT across all industries. Effective leadership requires internal implementation, as well. The tag at the top of this post - 'government' - helps you easily locate posts containing opportunities for and applications of Green ICT in government operations. (Green ICT in public education is found through the 'education' tag.) We note briefer items in this post, but haven't updated it recently. An email from TCO Certified reminded us that municipalities continue to pursue Green ICT purchasing.

Most Green ICT efforts focus on hardware. That make sense, because hardware lifecycles encompass everything from environmentally responsible sourcing of its raw materials through energy efficiency of its use to sustainable disposal at its end-of-life. Special utility software such as desktop power-saving plays a significant role in Green ICT, but less attention has been given to the application and system software within the gear. The most recent update is a tool anyone can use to evaluate a website's environmental performance.

Mobile devices replace the storage capacity and I/O options laptops with a host of cloud services. We first saw this when iPhone users began placing unprecedented demands on the cloud in 2009. Statistics compiled since then reveal the the amazing growth and scope of this demand. This only increases the urgency for cloud providers go green.

ICTworks wrote in March 2017, "Of the 1.2 billion people who lack basic energy access around the world, 772 million are covered by mobile networks." This means that the bases stations serving these are likely power all or in part by dirty diesel generators. The situation will get worse as coverage expands unless we have a covered effort to integrate #GreenICT into #ICT4D.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an American-lead initiative to collaboratively develop shred technology to improve data center performance and efficiency. Three Chinese large companies, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, founded a similar initiative in 2011.

We first encountered air-borne pollution as a threat when we reported about the impact of volcanic ash on Icelandic data centers. Man-made pollution is also an issue.

Intel's white paper Solar Power for PC Deployments: Enabling ICT Beyond the Grid is a clear and consise overview of how to calculate solar capacity for off-grid ICT. The methodology is illustrated with a case study about creating a solar-powered computer lab for a school in rural Bangladesh.

Short updates from Asia-Pacific. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe. Click on 'Asia-Pac' tag above for all news about the region. Our latest item looks at the scope of GreenICT.

The 2016 Seed Awards in India are promoting a "Green ICT" theme, but the description is a little off. "Does your eco-inclusive enterprise demonstrate social & environmental impacts through application of information and communications technology? Or does it provide solutions for sustainable consumption or production using information and communications technology?" This appears to be an example of confusing GreenICT with ICT4Green, nevertheless, we would encourage any enterprise with a true Green ICT focus to consider entering. This can help align ICT4D with Green ICT.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) services provider Akamai has launched a major initiative to reduce its GHG emissions. Most notable is its commitment to an absolute, not relative, reduction.

Akamai's May 2016 announcement: "Today we are committing, by 2020, to reduce our absolute greenhouse gas emissions below 2015 levels by sourcing renewable energy for 50 percent of our network operations."